Cross-correlation (time-lag-correlation) with pandas?

I have various time series, that I want to correlate - or rather, cross-correlate - with each other, to find out at which time lag the correlation factor is the greatest.

I found various questions and answers/links discussing how to do it with numpy, but those would mean that I have to turn my dataframes into numpy arrays. And since my time series often cover different periods, I am afraid that I will run into chaos.

Edit

The issue I am having with all the numpy/scipy methods, is that they seem to lack awareness of the timeseries nature of my data. When I correlate a time series that starts in say 1940 with one that starts in 1970, pandas corr knows this, whereas np.correlate just produces a 1020 entries (length of the longer series) array full of nan.

The various Q's on this subject indicate that there should be a way to solve the different length issue, but so far, I have seen no indication on how to use it for specific time periods. I just need to shift by 12 months in increments of 1, for seeing the time of maximum correlation within one year.

Edit2

Some minimal sample data:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
dfdates1 = pd.date_range('01/01/1980', '01/01/2000', freq = 'MS')
dfdata1 = (np.random.random_integers(-30,30,(len(dfdates1)))/10.0) #My real data is from measurements, but random between -3 and 3 is fitting
df1 = pd.DataFrame(dfdata1, index = dfdates1)
dfdates2 = pd.date_range('03/01/1990', '02/01/2013', freq = 'MS')
dfdata2 = (np.random.random_integers(-30,30,(len(dfdates2)))/10.0)
df2 = pd.DataFrame(dfdata2, index = dfdates2)

Due to various processing steps, those dfs end up changed into df that are indexed from 1940 to 2015. this should reproduce this:

bigdates = pd.date_range('01/01/1940', '01/01/2015', freq = 'MS')
big1 = pd.DataFrame(index = bigdates)
big2 = pd.DataFrame(index = bigdates)
big1 = pd.concat([big1, df1],axis = 1)
big2 = pd.concat([big2, df2],axis = 1)

This is what I get when I correlate with pandas and shift one dataset:

In [451]: corr_coeff_0 = big1[0].corr(big2[0])
In [452]: corr_coeff_0
Out[452]: 0.030543266378853299
In [453]: big2_shift = big2.shift(1)
In [454]: corr_coeff_1 = big1[0].corr(big2_shift[0])
In [455]: corr_coeff_1
Out[455]: 0.020788314779320523

And trying scipy:

In [456]: scicorr = scipy.signal.correlate(big1,big2,mode="full")
In [457]: scicorr
Out[457]: 
array([[ nan],
       [ nan],
       [ nan],
       ..., 
       [ nan],
       [ nan],
       [ nan]])

which according to whos is

scicorr               ndarray                       1801x1: 1801 elems, type `float64`, 14408 bytes

But I'd just like to have 12 entries. /Edit2

The idea I have come up with, is to implement a time-lag-correlation myself, like so:

corr_coeff_0 = df1['Data'].corr(df2['Data'])
df1_1month = df1.shift(1)
corr_coeff_1 = df1_1month['Data'].corr(df2['Data'])
df1_6month = df1.shift(6)
corr_coeff_6 = df1_6month['Data'].corr(df2['Data'])
...and so on

But this is probably slow, and I am probably trying to reinvent the wheel here. Edit The above approach seems to work, and I have put it into a loop, to go through all 12 months of a year, but I still would prefer a built in method.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a built in method that does exactly what you are asking. But if you look at the source code for the pandas Series method autocorr, you can see you've got the right idea:

def autocorr(self, lag=1):
    """
    Lag-N autocorrelation

    Parameters
    ----------
    lag : int, default 1
        Number of lags to apply before performing autocorrelation.

    Returns
    -------
    autocorr : float
    """
    return self.corr(self.shift(lag))

So a simple timelagged cross covariance function would be

def crosscorr(datax, datay, lag=0):
    """ Lag-N cross correlation. 
    Parameters
    ----------
    lag : int, default 0
    datax, datay : pandas.Series objects of equal length

    Returns
    ----------
    crosscorr : float
    """
    return datax.corr(datay.shift(lag))

Then if you wanted to look at the cross correlations at each month, you could do

 xcov_monthly = [crosscorr(datax, datay, lag=i) for i in range(12)]

There is a better approach: You can create a function that shifted your dataframe first before calling the corr().

Get this dataframe like an example:

d = {'prcp': [0.1,0.2,0.3,0.0], 'stp': [0.0,0.1,0.2,0.3]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data=d)

>>> df
   prcp  stp
0   0.1  0.0
1   0.2  0.1
2   0.3  0.2
3   0.0  0.3

Your function to shift others columns (except the target):

def df_shifted(df, target=None, lag=0):
	if not lag and not target:
		return df		
	new = {}
	for c in df.columns:
		if c == target:
			new[c] = df[target]
		else:
			new[c] = df[c].shift(periods=lag)
	return  pd.DataFrame(data=new)

Supposing that your target is comparing the prcp (precipitation variable) with stp(atmospheric pressure)

If you do at the present will be:

>>> df.corr()
      prcp  stp
prcp   1.0 -0.2
stp   -0.2  1.0

But if you shifted 1(one) period all other columns and keep the target (prcp):

df_new = df_shifted(df, 'prcp', lag=-1)

>>> print df_new
   prcp  stp
0   0.1  0.1
1   0.2  0.2
2   0.3  0.3
3   0.0  NaN

Note that now the column stp is shift one up position at period, so if you call the corr(), will be:

>>> df_new.corr()
      prcp  stp
prcp   1.0  1.0
stp    1.0  1.0

So, you can do with lag -1, -2, -n!!

To build up on Andre's answer - if you only care about (lagged) correlation to the target, but want to test various lags (e.g. to see which lag gives the highest correlations), you can do something like this:

lagged_correlation = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(
    {x: [df[target].corr(df[x].shift(-t)) for t in range(max_lag)] for x in df.columns})

This way, each row corresponds to a different lag value, and each column corresponds to a different variable (one of them is the target itself, giving the autocorrelation).